Week 12 - Migration and Legacy Content

Today we had a basic refresher on the benefits of Content Management via a presentation given by Vasont (this was done to keep CMS as a viable option given these rough economic conditions). The first and most important beneft would obviously be ROI. But Return on Investment can only first be calculated if it's possible to figure out what the cost to implement the system is in the first place. In figuring that cost out, one must examine a major aspect of implementing the CMS: Migration. Migration is the process by which the current doucmentation will "get" into the new content management system.
We can begin (and finish) discussing migration with the topic of Legacy Content. Legacy Content is content that was created before the content management system is implemented, but content that will be around after the CMS system is launched. It's content created with the idea that it will be converted into ACII text or a .cvs file in the future.

This conversion can happen in one of two ways: legacy content can be converted via a modular-source or book-source method. With modular source, you can mannually convert the legacy content across all documents, increasing conversion costs and time spent as each piece of content is converted as a stand-alone or peice meal effort. The benefit to this would be a granualr and micro examination of the content before being embedded into the CMS. On the other hand, book-sourced conversion, breaks down text by topics and headings and maximizes reuse. It is autmoated and does not require reauthoring; this method is of course cheaper and less time consuming.

Once a method is decided upon, or if both methods are used, the next thing one should look at are the best practices of Migration. The best practices comprise 5 activities:

• Understanding the requirements of the system
• Understanding the requirements of your legacy content
• Test/Pilot conversion
• Flexing the system; getting to know it's boundaries
• Producing; loading the system with the leagacy content.
  

Now, I could go into more depth on each of these 5 points, but they are fairly self-explanatory, except for point #2. In other words, understanding your document requirements involves deciphering how each tag is handled, determining what are explicit versus implicit topics, and deciding which tags belong where. These items might best be firgured out during either of the two legacy content conversion methods.